It is widely known that more scientific research activity could help to yield rapid social progress. The quality of scientific research is the key to the country's future. Scientific research with the characteristics of public goods is widely regarded as a classic case of market failure. Government should spend public oney on creating research funds to encourage scientific research. NSFC is the major source of funds in the field of management science in China. Because NSFC has a limited amount of funding, it is very competitive for proposers to receive the grant. According to the NSFC website, NSFC receives approximately 4811 proposals of general program projects in the field of management science, of which approximately 764 are funded in 2012. Only 15.88% of proposals are awarded.Receiving the award is an indication of the outstanding quality and expertise of the discipline, the research team or a scientist. An essential element in professional promotion and research performance is to be awarded a grant from the National Nature Science Foundation of China in some universities.
This study seeks an answer to the following question: Who can receive the national nature science research grant? Or what is the characteristic of proposers whose proposals is awarded?
Academic networks are social networks constructed by connecting actors if they have scientific collaboration or communication. The co-authored is main collaboration pattern of scientific collaboration. Interaction between coauthors frequency would positively influence knowledge creation in the field of both nature science and social science. In this study, we development a co-authorship network based on 20 top economics and management journals from 2007 to 2011. Two measurements of network attributes such as structural hole and centrality are calculated by using pajek program. We construct a new database by matching the characteristics of academic network at individual level to the number of awards by scholars receiving an NSFC award for the period 1999-2013. First, The Probit models are used to estimate the effect of the network position of scholars on the probability of national nature science fund proposal approval. Secondly, we carried out a number of robustness checks on our results. We use the Logit models to verify the contribution of the network position to the chance of receiving the grant. We also consider the sample of scholars who obtain the NSFC grant once to explore whether the results change. Furthermore, the lagged effect of the network position of scholars on the getting the grant are examined. Those results are consistent with previous studies. The final sections are dedicated to conclusions, limitation and future research directions.
The main empirical findings can be summarized as follows: (1) Scholars who occupy a central network position are easier to receive the NSFC grant support; (2) Scholars with abundant structural holes have more chance to get NSFC grant than managers with fewer structural holes. (3) Scholars have better chances of success if they have more publications; (4) Scholars who have been supported by NSFC before also improve the possibility of NSFC grant proposal approval. (5)The affiliation with “211” project university has a significant positive impact on scholars’ grant proposal of being approved. (6) The positive effect of publications in obtaining NSFC grant support increases as scholar’s network position decrease. Based on these results, we can predict which kind of network features can help scholars to obtain NSFC grant.